A one-man-band Irish horror film, directed, written and acted by Eoin Macken. Unfortunately this gentleman displays an entire lack of understanding of what's involved in the film-making process, and despite the found footage hook on which he hangs his movie, this turns out to be one of the worst in a glut of badly made recent horrors.
Narratives are all about ebb and flow. You start off subtle, build up tension and atmosphere to a climax, then simmer things down before building up again. Things inevitably lead to a final climax which should be bigger and more dramatic than that which has come before. This story, which tells of a birthday party in an abandoned building that goes horribly wrong, gives you precisely 10 minutes of set-up before letting rip with a constant soundtrack of high-pitched screaming.
I'm not kidding: there's no script here, just characters screaming and shouting for what seems like an eternity. Maybe it was done to cover up a lack of acting talent, but whatever the reason it's absolutely horrendous. The director has no understanding of subtlety or how it can be used to make a quietly effective and genuinely frightening movie. THE INSIDE goes all-out early on and stays like that till the climax.
The movie is also unpleasant, featuring defenceless women being terrorised by rapist thugs, at least at first. Things change later on, heavily indebted to the likes of REC and THE DESCENT as the party-goers fall victim to something sinister and nameless. But it's not scary, none of it is remotely frightening. The film also ends about 20 minutes too early and tacks on an extraneous sub-plot which makes it even worse, and I didn't even realise that was possible. This truly is the pits.
